A Systematic Approach to Disability Employment: An Evolutionary Game Framework Involving Government, Employers, and Persons with Disabilities

Abstract

Against the backdrop of inclusive development and modernization of employment governance, the limitations of traditional approaches to promoting employment for persons with disabilities—such as information asymmetries and inefficient resource allocation—have become increasingly salient. Building a systematic promotion framework for disability employment has therefore emerged as a critical agenda for advancing modern social governance. Drawing on bounded rationality and information asymmetry theories, this study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model encompassing government, employers, and persons with disabilities. By incorporating key elements such as initial intentions, skill matching, and policy signal transmission, the model analyzes the strategic choices and dynamic interactions among stakeholders. We conduct numerical simulations using delay differential equations (DDEs), perform stability and sensitivity analyses in MATLAB R2024b, and triangulate findings with a practice-based case from Shanghai. The results indicate that persons with disabilities exhibit the highest policy responsiveness within the employment ecosystem and act as the core driver of convergence toward desirable equilibria through four mechanisms: skill-matching effects, policy signal diffusion, perceived institutional fairness, and system-level synergy gains. Although employer subsidies and penalties directly target firms, they exert the strongest psychological incentive effects on persons with disabilities, revealing a “misaligned incentives” feature in policy signaling. Systemic synergy gains activate market network effects, facilitating a pivotal shift from “policy transfusion” to “market self-sustenance.” Based on these findings, we propose a diversified policy toolkit, enhanced policy signaling mechanisms, and innovations in concentrated employment models to support the modernization of disability employment governance.